The Plum Tree (23 page)

More and more planes appeared. The trees and the earth trembled. She watched in horror as the lead plane dropped its deadly marker over the air base, and the strong wind blew it back over the village. Within seconds, the silver of hundreds of dropping bombs reflected in the afternoon sun, falling over rooftops and steeples like used bullet casings from the chamber of an automatic gun. It crossed her mind that she might be imagining the bombs, because she didn’t hear the whistle of the shells falling through the air. But then she remembered someone saying that you only heard the screaming sound when the missiles were above you. Here, she was practically even with the airplanes, and she could see their bloated underbellies giving birth to their deadly payload. Suddenly, she remembered the story Herr Weiler’s nephew had told in the shelter about the attack on Hamburg. Her body went rigid. Maybe they were a different kind of bomb. Maybe that was why she couldn’t hear them. Maybe they were the kind of bomb that melted stone buildings and turned humans into ash.

She gripped the tree in her arms as if the earth were going to drop out from beneath her, waiting for the first explosion. The hollow thump-thump of detonation vibrated in her feet, and the blasts made her jump. One repercussion after another echoed through the valley as her village disappeared behind black walls of fire and smoke. Now, the tumbling bombs vanished halfway down, their silver flashes swallowed by churning, rising clouds of destruction. Christine’s legs felt like water, ready to trickle out from beneath her. After the first line of planes turned in the sky and flew away, the next squadron attacked the air base. When a third line of planes appeared and dropped more bombs on the village, Christine sagged to her knees, leaning against the tree for support.

For what felt like hours, she watched bombs fall, staring numbly as the valley filled with flames and smoke. The scorched smell of burning houses made her nauseous. She gagged, her empty stomach sending bile up in the back of her throat. Finally, the planes disappeared, their growling roar replaced by the crackle of fire and distant screams.

Dizzy and light-headed, she pried her hands from the tree and stumbled down the hill toward home. Branches and thorns tore at her arms as she crashed through the underbrush, not following the usual path, just headed straight down. Her arms and legs felt detached from her brain, like the long-limbed cloth doll she used to carry around as a young girl, its face nothing but blank cloth. Her mind, reeling from terror, somehow directed her numb, rag-doll body to take her home.

Half an hour later, she entered the fire- and smoke-filled village on trembling legs, her chest heaving, her face covered in dirt and sweat. The charred stench of burning buildings and the acidic, sweet smell of burning human flesh made her gag. She held her hand over her mouth and ran, forced to search for detours around flame-filled streets and collapsed buildings. There were people running, calling for loved ones and digging in piles of rubble with bare hands. Some villagers stood rooted to one spot, mumbling and staring, rivulets of blood running in their hair or down their arms or legs, clothes scorched and torn. Shoeless children wandered aimlessly, the whites of their eyes like bright moons in their soot-covered faces. A man with a scalded face and burnt arms reached out to grab Christine. She nearly fell trying to avoid his grasp.

At last, she found the corner to Schellergasse Strasse and stopped. The road was filled with a thick wall of brownish-black smoke, and she could only see halfway up the hill. Despite the heat from the burning village, she shivered, the icy grip of terror making it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. She took off her apron, wadded it up in her hands, and held it over her nose and mouth. Then she made her way forward, stepping around scattered roof tiles, broken bricks, burnt timbers, and shattered glass. A cat came flying out of the smoke and screeched across her path, its fur seared and steaming. Then, to her left, the smoke started to clear, revealing the front of the church, its steeple a smoldering pile of rubble on the front lawn, two cathedral windows filled with licking flames. Then she could see her neighbor’s barn, caved in and burning. The smoke was being blown in the opposite direction, and the air in the street started to clear. A curtain was being lifted. She held her breath, waiting to see what horror would be revealed. Then, finally, she cried out. Her house was still standing. The front windows were blown out and the upper branches of the plum trees were burnt and shriveled, but the roof was intact, and the walls looked undamaged. Tears streamed down her face. She ran the rest of the way up the hill, through the open front door of her house, and up the steps.

“Mutti? Oma? Maria?” she yelled, racing through the halls. No one answered. She ran back downstairs and outside, then saw Oma standing near the woodshed, crying and holding her arm. Christine’s breath caught in her throat. Oma was too close to the burning barn, her small frame outlined by a high wall of orange flames. The skin on Oma’s wrist and right hand was raw and blistered.

“Come away from there!” Christine yelled over the crackle and hiss of the fire. She led Oma toward the other side of the house. “Where is everyone?”

“Maria took the boys to the store,” Oma said in a monotone, her eyes locked on the burning barn. “She left before the siren started. I don’t know where your mother is. I think she went looking for you.”

Christine felt her chest constrict. If something had happened to her mother because she didn’t come back from picking apples when she was supposed to, she’d never be able to live with herself. “Where’s Opa?” she said, examining Oma’s injured arm.

“In there,” Oma said, pointing toward the blaze. “He tried to put out the flames because he was afraid our woodshed would burn. But the barn wall fell on him.”

Christine looked at the burning structure, her gorge rising in her throat. A group of Hitler Youth had appeared and formed a bucket brigade to finish dousing the flames closest to the woodshed. She wrapped her arms around Oma, blinking back tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she said in Oma’s ear. Just then, Mutti came running toward them through the smoke-filled street, her hands and legs covered with soot, a trickle of blood dripping from her forehead. Christine went limp with relief.

“Is everyone all right?” Mutti yelled, her face distorted with fear.

“We don’t know where Maria and the boys are,” Christine shouted. Then she paused and placed a hand on Mutti’s arm, prepared to hold her up when she told her the news. “I’m sorry, Mutti,” she said. “Opa has been killed.”

For a moment, she wasn’t sure what her mother was going to do. Would she scream, break down and cry, fall to her knees, go into shock? Christine held her breath, waiting for the words to sink in. For what seemed like forever, Mutti stared at them, her face a blank. And then, slowly, Mutti’s watering eyes cleared. She took a deep breath, pressed her lips together in resolve, and said, “I’ll go to the shelter to look for Maria and the boys. Stay with Oma.”

Before Christine could protest, Mutti hurried down the street. Christine took Oma inside and made her lie down on the living room couch, covering her with a blanket. Neither of them spoke while Christine carefully washed and dressed Oma’s burned arm with a clean cloth. Oma pressed her lips together and closed her eyes, refusing to complain even though she had to be in considerable pain. Christine tried to keep her hands steady as she worked, trying to ignore the sounds of buildings collapsing, people yelling and screaming, and the clang-clang-clang of the Hitler Youth’s horse-drawn fire brigade, ringing in false hope above the mayhem.

When the house filled with smoke and the sulfuric smell of the burning village, Christine opened the back windows and the doors between the rooms to create airflow. In the kitchen, she climbed on a chair to retrieve Vater’s bottle of plum schnapps, hidden in the back of a high cupboard, and took a long, deep swig, trying not to cough when the alcohol burned her throat. Then she took the bottle into the living room, where she persuaded Oma to sit up and drink two full shots of the clear liquid, the only medicine they had to ease her pain. After putting the bottle away, Christine swept the clumps of dirt and shards of window glass from the floor, wiped the film of ashes from the table, then pulled a dining room chair next to the couch so she could sit beside Oma.

“You better clean those scratches on your arms,” Oma said.

“Shhh . . . Don’t worry about me,” Christine said, stroking Oma’s cheek. “Try to rest.”

Oma looked back at her with watery blue eyes, her thin, wrinkled lips trembling as she tried not to cry. Christine didn’t think she could bear seeing Oma weep, and was relieved when the exhausted old woman closed her eyes and fell asleep.

After a growing breeze cleared most of the smoke from the room, Christine shut the windows in the back of the house, closed the living room door, and hung blankets over the blown-out front windows. In the near-dark living room, she turned the switch of a lamp. Nothing happened. She tried another lamp. Still nothing. She felt her way to the kitchen, found the oil lantern, lit it, and hurried back to the living room, where she set the lamp in the middle of the table and sat back down beside Oma. There was nothing else to do now, but wait.

Finally, Mutti returned with Maria, Karl, and Heinrich, in an eruption of frantic voices and filthy clothes that smelled like the inside of a garbage-filled woodstove. Maria was crying, her hair disheveled and her eyes swollen. Karl and Heinrich sat sniffling at the end of the couch, smudges of soot mixing with their tears.

“We weren’t near our shelter when the sirens went off,” Maria sobbed. “We went to a different one. I didn’t have time to come back for Oma and Opa! I had to take care of the boys!”

“It’s all right,” Mutti said. “Who knows what would have happened to you if you hadn’t gotten to a shelter in time?”

“I was going to leave the boys and come home,” Maria cried. “But the shelter started filling with smoke, and I was too afraid to go outside!”

“You did the right thing,” Oma said. “You could have been killed, and then what would we have done? Your Opa lived a good, long life. He would have given it up for any of you.”

Christine stared at her shell-shocked, grieving family, barely able to comprehend what her life had become. While she was living in constant fear of bombs falling on top of her house as she slept, her father had been taken away by the war, Isaac had been taken away by the Nazis, and now Opa had been killed by some unseen enemy, an enemy who dropped fire and death from the skies. She stood and started toward the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Mutti asked.

“We could all use something to eat and drink,” Christine said, her back to her mother so she wouldn’t see that Christine was on the verge of falling apart. “I’ll make some tea and cut some bread.”

“I’ll help,” Mutti said, standing.

“You stay here,” Christine said. “They need you.”

In the kitchen, Christine closed the door and went to the sink, where she rinsed her face and stared at the white porcelain, letting beads of cold water run down her forehead and drip from her chin. Then she made the mistake of licking her lips. Her mouth filled with the taste of smoke and ashes. She gagged and spit into the sink over and over, rinsing her mouth with handful after handful of water from the faucet.

When the tang of death was finally washed from her taste buds, she soaked a cloth and twisted it out, over and over again, wrenching it hard enough to make her hands hurt. It felt like ice against her hot skin, numbing the bloody scratches on her arms and legs. She bit down on her lip, threw the cloth into the sink, and gripped the edge of the counter, trying to fight her grief and panic. But it was no use; she was drowning, with no bottom in sight. She let go and slid into a corner, crumpling between the wall and the cupboards like a frightened kitten. The men in her life had disappeared, and now she couldn’t help wondering if the Allies would succeed at wiping Germany off the face of the earth. It only made sense that Heinrich and Karl—and ultimately, she, Maria, Mutti, and Oma—would be next.

C
HAPTER
16

T
wo days after the bombing, a wagon carrying rows of sheet-wrapped bodies passed in front of Christine’s house. When she heard the creak of the dry axles and the clip-clop of hooves against the cobblestone, she pulled back the curtains to watch through the broken living room windows. Following the makeshift hearse with their heads down, a group of women, children, and elderly people walked in slow motion, their hands clasped around Bibles, crosses, or bouquets of wildflowers. She wondered if the bodies had been pulled from the rubble, or dug out of cellars, or, as she’d heard someone say, hauled from the banks of the river. So far, the casualty count from the bombing had reached two hundred and twenty-three.

But there would be no burial or funeral or coffin for Opa. The Hitler Youth and a few old men had searched for his remains, but they hadn’t found anything: not a tooth or a belt buckle or a shard of bone. The spot where the barn had once stood was nothing but smoldering ash, the iron tools and wagon trusses melted into shards of twisted metal. Last night, Christine and her family had taken Oma to the cemetery on the edge of town to put black-eyed Susans on Opa’s parents’ graves, as a way to honor his memory. Afterward, they prayed around the dining room table, each sharing his or her favorite story of Opa. They vowed to put up a tombstone once the war was over.

Earlier bombings had wreaked havoc on the outer edges of the village, but this last raid had left half of it in ruins. In an odd pattern, every street seemed to have three or four houses left unscathed, followed by a row of dwellings completely flattened. In addition to the church and barn beside Christine’s house, the destruction in the immediate area of Schellergasse Strasse included two houses behind theirs and four houses on the next street over. The ceiling of Herr Weiler’s butcher shop had caved in, and the windows in the café were gone, along with kettle-sized chunks of stone from the front façade.